PIENA DI GRAZIA - Big Mary, si muore di sguardi (2024)
lyrics Vittorio Ondedei
director Demetrio Giacomelli
live soundtrack
Flavia Massimo: cello, fx
Caterina Palazzi: double bass, fx
Big Mary is our favourite lady elephant. She dies. We warn you. In 1916, they hung her and had people pay for the show. But once she used to move lightly and steadily about tents, ropes, and straw bales. She would raise ballerinas. She would squirt clowns. She could fly! No, that’s Dumbo. He’s smart – he went with the crows. Now the crows are circling Big Mary. Call the children! Children, step back! Somebody call somebody! Piena di grazia, with its crowded images and a live performance in duo mode for cello and double bass with effects and loops, mixing ambient, jazz, and psychedelic sounds and spanning from classical music heritage to the contemporary scene and experimentation, is dedicated to her and to the victims of the show business and the gaze of others.
Caterina Palazzi. Double bass player and composer, since 2007 leader of the band Sudoku Killer, a well-known quartet in the European jazz, noise, and experimental scene, with which she has recorded three albums. She has more than 700 concerts throughout Europe and Asia to her credit. In 2010, she won the 'Jazzit Award' as best Italian composer. In 2022, she was listed among the 20 best Italian bassists ever by Rockit magazine. In 2023, Palazzi opened the Italian tour of Kim Gordon, historic bassist of Sonic Youth.
Flavia Massimo is a contemporary cellist, sound artist, and event curator, specialising in both classical and electronic music. She has composed soundtracks for shows, dance and theatre performances and created interactive art and live soundtrack installations. Her intense activity live has led her to work with several well-known classical, pop, and contemporary musicians in Italy and abroad. She is the artistic director of “Paesaggi Sonori”.
Demetrio Giacomelli. A graduate in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Genoa, he started working as an assistant director for film director Paolo Caredda. In 2017, he made Diorama, with which he won the Best Italian Documentary Award at the Turin Film Festival. He participated in two editions of the Pesaro Film Festival. In 2017, he made the science-fiction film L'estinzione rende liberi, which won first prize in the Prospettive section of the Filmmaker Festival in Milan. In 2021, he directed The Kennel and Lotta di classe, il cinema dei ragazzi di Emilio Sidoti garnering prizes and awards. He made the serial film Totò Cannibale for drogamagazine.com.
Vittorio Ondedei (1966) is Ruben Camillas and Topazio Perlini as well. His artistic activity aims to establish a relationship with the world and the people: he plays, sings, writes, tells stories, mimes, imagines, dances, provokes, smiles, and improvises. He often works with others because he looks for mixing and contamination. Among his recent productions, Ho sonno, with Giulio Escalona (2022-24); Teatrino dei Tarocchi Trasformati (2022-24); Wundercameretta (2024). He plays in the fantastic band Crema.
A decade of bare, unvarnished Wall; of wild, but reasoned programming; of illustrious and essential proposals. A space for experimentation whose embryo hatched in 2015. But then images clung to the Wall like ivy does in Spring, and sounds were set free like outlandish fireflies giving off their flashes over nocturnal paths. Now the Wall has become a (mutant and mutable) meeting that can’t be missed. Senses are unchained in a space in which, nourished by vibrating gazes, foraged by precious imaginaries, suggestions are redeemed. Novel psycho-temporal premieres, unique experiences that, between improvisations, surgical synchronizations, and emotional experiments, have elevated the unreal and turned it into… a reality. Palazzo Gradari, the temple of imagination. The five events of this year, poised between light and abyss, will give voice to original impromptu, and therefore absolute, experiences. Past the 2015-2024 twilight, the Wall of Sound is ready to take off.
Anthony Ettorre
We have looked this decade of projecting images onto the Wall of Palazzo Gradari in the eyes. We have caressed the profile of musicians intertwined with film directors of the past and the present, between the calculated gestures of actors and actresses or immersed in pure pictures untethered from any story. We have put all our desires in a row. The result was these 5 evenings, made of 5 unique live soundtracks, several unexpected meetings, animals, soccer players, and little dolls. The common thread – do not touch bare-handed! – might be the sweet dissolution of identity, when it becomes too stiff and makes us cantankerous and savage. It could also be the desire to discuss seriously about games and playing, discarding the fascist trivial assertion that it’s “stuff for children.” We’ll be waiting for critical analyses. We will never give up.
Vittorio Ondedei
The Wall of Sound reversed the idea that this solid, vertical object, the wall, conveys the notion of blocking, filtering, pushing back, separating, defending, shutting.
The images and sounds that have been played on that surface over the years made that wall crumble and collapse, every time.
The miracle is repeated punctually with the same enthusiasm and the same desire.
The wall becomes liquid, and we can cross it. Beyond it, there is infinity. By Palazzo Gradari, the divisive function of walls was never given a chance to exist. Ever.
Giuliano Antinori
TUTTE LE PROIEZIONI SONO GRATUITE
